How would I replicate this in ESX 3.5 so that I can remove the HDD after it is done with the backup?

We use a SAS internal controller card for the ESX server that is connected to a drive bay hosting a single HD(No RAID will be setup).

The way I understand this is, we will need to create a new datastore, assign the new datastore to the HDD, backup to it, unmount the datastore, disconnect the HDD, rinse and repeat.

We are backing up 900 GB of data every night, and prefer full backups due to ease of restoring files. Backing up to a local workstation isn't an option because 900 GB on a T1 would take far too long. Same thing with a NAS.

12 Replies

Upgrade to vSphere, and use USB pass through :) Get a 3TB USB drive, and pass it through to your VM.

900GB on a T1 is fine as long as you do incremental, so you only have to do the full once and you can use a USB seed drive and your diff isn't more than 5% a day (unlikely for most systems). Just use some intelligent backup software and you'll be fine (like veeam).

We don't have money to upgrade to vSphere. We only do full backups here, strictly for ease of restoring files, based on past experiences. I want to work with what we've got. Upgrading to vSphere alone is going to be very costly.

You could migrate to XEN or Hyper-V and setup a script that at a particular time of day mounts the drive, then shares it to the VM that then formats it and kicks off the backup. That's a fair amount of scripting (Powershell or Bash) but in theory it could work.

Your likely going to have to change one of your operational constraints (simple, Free, Vmware, Full backups). to fix this.

Essentials is a great deal now that there is an upgrade path (used to not be). But you will find that USB passthrough via ESX is sloooww - no where near 400 Mb/s. There may be improvements in version 5, but I doubt it.

If your ESX servers are not connected to any SAN storage and you're set on doing full backups every day, then I would:

Insert the disk

Present it to the VM as an RDM disk.

Run the backup and remove the disk

Now if you ever need to read the data from something other than ESXi, you'll be good to go because it's not formatted VMFS. After backing it up and removing the disk, you could attach it to any workstation or server, you can still read the data. Cool eh?